Are We A Nation?

One hundred and fourteen years ago, French historian Ernest
Renan, in a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, posed and
answered the question, "What is a nation?" Renan began by
disposing in short order of the arguments that nations are
made by race, religion, language, commerce or borders.
Many nations, he noted, do not share a common language, race or
religion. Commerce, he said, does not rise to the level
of a collective soul, a national principle; and there is
neither rationality or permanence to borders.

Instead, he said, with a disarming simplicity that has
made his essay immortal:

Now, the essence of a nation is that all its
people have a great deal in common, and also that they
have forgotten a great deal.

What Renan meant by this is that a nation, in the words
of Benedict Anderson, is an "imagined community," a
group of people sharing a common story, a community
by choice. They may not even share any borders;
the world wide Jewish community and the denizens of the
Internet may both be characterized as nations under
Renan's definition:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.
Two things, which, in truth, are really one, constitute this
soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other
in the present. One is the possession in common of a
rich legacy of memories; the other is the present-day consent,
the desire to live together, the will to continue to
value the undivided heritage one has received....
To have the glory of the past in common, a shared will
in the present; to have done great deeds together, and want
to do more of them, are the essential conditions for
the constitution of a people....One loves the house which one
has built and passes on.

However, Renan is astute to say that to be a nation, we must
have forgotten as well as remembered together. No French citizen,
he points out, can tell you if he is Burgundian, Alain,
Visigoth in origin; every French citizen is required to have
forgotten the massacre of Protestants in the Middle Ages.
Similarly, in the U.S. our nationhood--when we had it--
required us to forget that our nation was built on
war
crimes and
genocide.

Can we say, on the eve of the millenium, that we still
have an American national story which meets Renan's
requirements? Witness John Jay's answer to the question
of nationhood, almost 100 years before Renan, in Federalist
No. 2:

Providence has been pleased to give this one
connected country, to one united people, a people descended
from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing
the same religion, attached to the same principles of
government, very similar in their manners and customs...

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.

What is our national story today? It is hard to imagine
that a cross-section of Americans would give a consistent
answer. Jay, writing in 1787, knew a story,
which had been established just 11 years before: Americans,
he said, "by their joint counsel, arms and efforts,
fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war,
have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence."
But this story has become almost meaningless to us now;
the bold deeds of the past must not only be supplemented
by more recent ones, but must also be suffused by
shared values, or else a story is insufficient to
create a "soul".

You and I may differ; I may believe in larger government,
you in smaller; but we must have some shared pivot, some
point around which we both rotate, to be members of the
same nation. If the shared story, the pivot of all
Christians, is the Bible, I respectfully suggest that the
central point of the American nation ought to be its
Constitution, which I have said elsewhere constitutes the
metadata
of the American system. The Constitution itself may be built of
words, but those words sing. They sing of the following:

We are all created equal and are to have access to
equal opportunities.

The government governs by our consent.

None of us is to be denied procedural and substantive
justice in our treatment by the state.

A zone of privacy exists around each of us in which
the state cannot interfere.

No law may be made infringing our freedom of speech.

Ours is a secular state, in which each may worship as he
pleases, or not at all.

The Constitution, as Ronald Dworkin aptly said, is a
novel one chapter of which is written by each new
generation of judges; they may invent the plot, so
long as they are faithful to their characters and
the developments sketched by those who have gone before.
In Renan's terms, the Constitution and the case law
decided under it is the evolving embodiment of our
long national story; and it is a tale informed by
humility, tolerance and optimism. We protect free
speech because we are humble and not too quick to say
that only our own ideas may be right. We recognize
diversity, of ideas and races, because we are
humble and tolerant. And we are optimistic, as we must be
to trust ourselves and our fellows and to believe that
all will always come out right in the end.

The problem is that this is a story that almost no-one knows
today. Most people have not read the Constitution and will
not recognize sample language from it. More seriously,
demagogues have arisen, on both ends of the political
spectrum, who have convinced millions in this country
that our national story does not involve humility,
tolerance, or optimism; that equality does not exist;
that fairness and justice are not important; that
privacy is dangerous and that freedom of speech is
our destruction; and that the Founders never really intended
us to be a secular nation.

Such people have a national story of their own wholly alien
to the Constitution, and destructive of American democracy.
You don't need to look on the fringes to find wilfull
blindness and frightening denial of the American
story. The other day I picked up a copy of the National
Review, which I always believed represented mainstream,
loyal conservativism, and found the publisher's
editorial recommending the passage of a Constitutional
amendment forbidding the Supreme Court from holding
any statute passed by Congress to be unconstitutional. Such
an amendment, would of course, pull out one of the pillars
of our system, subjecting us to the tyranny of the
majority, something the Founders deliberately avoided
with their arcane system of endless checks and balances.
But here it is again, in the
Republican party platform for the '96 election:

The federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has overstepped its
authority under the Constitution. It has usurped the right of citizen legislators and
popularly elected executives to make law by declaring duly enacted laws to be
"unconstitutional" through the misapplication of the principle of judicial review. Any
other role for the judiciary, especially when personal preferences masquerade as
interpreting the law, is fundamentally at odds with our system of government in
which the people and their representatives decide issues great
and small.

If one of the two major political parties in our system has
diverged this far from our national tradition, one can't help
but wonder what common strands unite us as nation. Is it
possible that this attack on the judiciary as a check on
tyranny is a blind spot, an unfortunate mistake that should not
distract us from a common interest in liberty?

Use my bulleted items above as a checklist and ask yourself what
the commitment is of the same voices to
compassion or tolerance, to justice or freedom of speech or to the
secular nature of our nation. This year's unmistakeably
frightening phenomenon was that of the Republican candidates
paying tribute to the religious right, the group whose newsletter,
"Christian Nation", by its very name expresses belief in a
national story completely at odds with the Constitution.

If we are still a nation, what do we have in common if not
our Constitution? I am personally desperate to believe that the
apparently growing, and ever more vocal forces of fundamentalism
in this country have not overwhelmed, and will not, the
peaceful middle. It is hard, no
matter where you sit, to detect the common strand in 240 million
Americans, but if we hope still to be a nation by any stretch
of Renan's definition, that hope lies in the center, where it is
easy to imagine that there is still compassion, good fellowship
and common sense.

I was raised to believe that ours is a compassionate story; and
it is not hard to find the traces of compassion in the
Constitution's protection of fairness and freedom of
worship and speech. Even if we did not have our Constitution
in common, if you and I had compassion in common, we might
still be a nation, or at least the beginnings of one. But
what that compassion means is that, no matter how radically I
disagree with you, I am still beholden to you, responsible
for you, dedicated to aid you when you need me, and
entitled to expect your help when I am in need. So, though we
agree on nothing else, we may agree that we belong to each other.

But this country is full of people today who have identified
large numbers of their fellow citizens as outsiders, as
"the other", with whom they have no bond. This year's initiatives
to penalize legal immigrants in this country, to end Aid to
Families with Dependent Children and affirmative action, may
hide behind a mask of compassion. But it does not take
much time or much energetic inquiry to determine that most
proponents of ending these programs don't offer any alternative,
nor feel there is a need for one. In their hearts, they are
not ending dependency, or pruning back big government; they
are jettisoning the trash people, who may be left to their
own devices to scratch or die. But this is not our
national story of justice. Because if you felt that the
poor, the disadvantaged and the foreign belonged
to you, were part of your nation, you could not
act this way.

Renan points out that a crucial underpinning of our national
identity is our continuing desire, reaffirmed each day,
to continue living together:

A nation is a great act of solidarity, constituted
by the memory of the sacrifices one has made and those one
is inclined to make in the future. A nation supposes a past;
it expresses itself in the present by a tangible fact:
the consent, the desire clearly expressed to continue living
together. The existence of a nation is (excuse me for
the metaphor) a daily plebiscite, in the same way that
individual existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

It follows from this that if a fragment of the nation concludes
that it no longer shares the national story, it must be able
to withdraw from the "great act of solidarity;" the majority
cannot deny it the right to do so. "A nation has no more right
than a king," said Renan, "to say to a province: 'You belong to me;
I will take you.'"

Looked at this way, the American nation
died in 1861, when President Lincoln decreed that "a house divided
against itself cannot stand," then resolved that the way to
end the division was to force the South to remain. Doubtless
I will get letters posing the question whether the South should
have been permitted to withdraw, if that meant the perpetuation
of slavery. While the termination of slavery seems to me among
the very few legitimate excuses for a war, the North--if slavery
was its true or its main motivation--could simply have ended
it, left the South and conditioned the future peace on the
continued abandonment of slavery. By forcing the Southern
states to remain in the Union, the North dealt a wound to
the American idea of nation that has continued to fester
to this day. The decision to force states that wished to secede
to remain in the Union against their will undercuts everything
we know of Lincoln as a philosopher, and contradicts the
intentions of the Founders. There is an unbearable contradiction
between our reverence for the Declaration of Independence,
and our contempt for the South's own declaration. Renan says,
"A nation never has a legitimate interest in annexing or
retaining a territory in spite of itself." And he is right.

The question, are we a nation, leads inevitably to a related
question: should we be? There is an argument that large states
were necessary for a period of our history when they were
our only defense against other large dangerous states. The
Soviet Union's recognition a few years ago that it lacked a national
story, and its decision to dissolve into smaller units that
had one, may have set off a wave of similar actions around the
globe. Not only have many of the former Eastern European
nations dissolved; even Canada seemed willing to let
Quebec go, if its citizens had decided that they no longer
wished to participate in the Canadian story. It is possible
that the United States, a thousand years from now,
will no longer exist, or if it does, that it will not resemble
the United States of today even slightly. What we refer to as
the Roman empire was Italy, then Europe and part of Africa,
and then, in its last years, existed only in the East, having
given up even Rome to the barbarians. Everything changes, and
eventually,
everything passes away.

From this perspective, it might not be a bad thing if the
United States one day divided up into multiple nations.
Perhaps Renan was naive; perhaps there never was a nation
in history that fit his definition. Probably there have always
been countries in which people holding different national stories
were somehow woven together. Since no people has ever unanimously
believed anything, does it take 51% adherence to a story to create
a nation or more? Renan leaves us without guidance. If a nation
really consists of twelve nations, is it not a step in
the direction of self-realization for the component peoples
to separate, so that they no longer have to endure, and
compromise with, one another?

However, the Federalist papers effectively answer the question
of why we should want larger nations: precisely because their
diversity is the best guarantee that we will live peacefully
together. "Among the numerous advantages," says James Madison
in No. 10, "promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be
more accurately developed than the tendency to break and
control the violence of faction":

[I]t may be concluded, that a pure Democracy,
by which I mean, a Society, consisting of a small number of
citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in
person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction....
Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles
of turbulence and contention....

A Republic, by which I mean a Government in which a scheme
of representation takes place, opens a different prospect,
and promises the cure for which we are seeking....

The two great points of difference between a Democracy and
a Republic are, first, the delegation of the Government,
in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the
rest: secondly, the greater number of citizens, and
greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be
extended. (Emphasis added)

Thus Madison believed that the best way to avoid the violence
of faction--the dark side of the national story--was both
a system of checks and balances and a larger country, with
a greater diversity of citizens, so that no one opinion
could too easily hold sway. If we need a laboratory example
of his thesis, it is neatly proven by the former
Yugoslavia, which found genocide on the path of
becoming small.

We are in danger of the same. There is a constituent element
of the American polity which desires to be separate, is
authoritarian and even fundamentalist, and which believes
in violence as a potential solution to its problems. These
are the people I have written about who have twisted
the metadata to mean that the only significant statement
in the Constitution is the Second Amendment, which in their
opinion grants
an individual right to revolution. This faction essentially
believes that all humanity, including all Americans, is
divided into two basic categories:
those who deserve to be shot, and those who have a right to shoot them.

I believe that we now arrive at the answers to both questions:

Are we a nation? The answer is that we are just barely
a nation, if are still one at all. There has never been an era
in our country when more faction existed, when more of us were
more hateful and certain in our hate, and desirous to terminate
our bonds with one another.

Should we be a nation? The American story--if I
am correct that it is a tale of humility, tolerance, and optimism--
is a beautiful one. It is being destroyed but can still be saved.
The solution to saving it is, of course, to practice humility,
tolerance and optimism. We must want to be a nation in order to be.
We must search for the common ground, the overlapping thread
in our stories. We must believe it is there in order to find
it. A leap of faith is needed.